Assange and the Nobel

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This article was written on October 9, 2022 from Cassandra

Flashes of Cassandra 518/ Assange and the Nobel

What happened to Assange's candidacy for the Nobel Peace Prize?

Julian Assange, an Australian citizen and journalist, is still rotting in Belmarsh maximum security prison in the United Kingdom; in a country where great attention is placed on the rulers, but where an innocent person still remains in prison, without being a citizen of that country and without being accused of any crime.

He is there while the local government has not yet decided when to hand him over to a third country, the United States, where he is accused of many crimes, the reasons for which are not worth spending any more words on.

He has the very serious fault of having done his job and having allowed people to be informed and therefore freer. “Free” in the sense used by Jesus in the Gospel of John (8, 32): “You will know the truth and the truth will set you free”. And therefore Assange fully meets the definition of hero: “A hero is he who, going against his own advantage and safety, carries out an action from which many others will derive real benefit”.

Alas, too many people consider this to be of little importance to their lives.

Since 7 December 2010, Assange has lived without the freedom to move and have social relationships, including confinements and detentions of different types; For three years he has been living in solitary confinement in a maximum security prison.

It's been years since the media lights abandoned him and, apart from a few isolated articles that appeared in the Italian press, which ranged from the uninformed to the nauseating, Assange "mediatically" no longer exists.

This aggravates the danger for him; those in their oppressive conditions can only benefit from media attention.

This is also why at the end of 2021 Cassandra promoted and participated in a campaign aimed at nominate Julian Assange for the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize, also addressed to Italian and European parliamentarians.

A few days ago the prize was awarded, which instead went to Ales Bialiatski a Belarusian activist known for his work on civil rights, and to two humanitarian organizations, the Russia's Memorial and Ukraine's Center for civil Liberties.

Obviously nothing to say about the winners.

If anything, it can be noted that, with respect to Assange's candidacy, this choice does not create any conflict between the European Union and the United States, while the awarding of the Nobel to Assange would have seen the EU in opposition to the USA and the UK.

In an Andreotti style, clear considerations could be made on the fact that for the second consecutive year the prize is awarded to dissidents from countries of the former Soviet Union.

It would have been a much more objective and courageous act if the Norwegian Nobel Peace Committee had drawn the winner among the “dissidents and the oppressed of our home”, which would certainly have made 5 nations, belonging to the so-called "Western democracies", unhappy.

And so the lack of support for Assange, which the awarding of the Nobel would have provided, leaves him in that condition of oppression and danger which would certainly have been counteracted, both by the awarding of the prize itself and by the spotlight of the media, spotlights that l 'they should have framed it again.

Finally, it was, once again, a missed opportunity to award a courageous Nobel, more attentive to the merits and substance of the facts than to the politics of the moment.

Marco Calamari

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